SIXTEEN
Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.
—The World Crisis, Winston Churchill
ON THE NIGHT before the great celebration of 14 July 1919, 100,000 spectators had already taken up positions along the Champs-Élysées, their tone one of restrained jubilation tempered by the presence of so many women still clad in mourning for a loved one. The janitors and charwomen had barely finished sweeping away the debris of diplomacy from Versailles’ great Hall of Mirrors, but peace was now a fact. The signature of the treaty had swiftly become eclipsed by the imminence of this other, tangibly more magnificent occasion—the day of the Victory Parade; to many Frenchmen, never could there be an occasion more fitting of le jour de gloire acclaimed by the “Marseillaise” than this first quatorze since Alsace-Lorraine had returned to the fold from its forty-eight years of bondage.
As the dawn came up, down at the Porte-Maillot the massed Allied contingents could be seen forming up behind their leaders, greeted by members of the Municipal Council, who, like the aediles of antiquity, were opening the city to the conquering armies. At 7:45, a car arrived at the Étoile bringing Clemenceau. Occasionally shooting fierce glances to right and left, the old “Tiger” shambled slowly up to the official stand. Accompanied by France’s two glorious marshals, Joffre and Foch, President Poincaré laid a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe. The marshals then drove off to take up their positions at the head of the parade. At the Porte-Maillot, a captain took out his watch and gave the order heard at so many lethal dawns during the preceding four years: “Avancez!” Trumpets sounded those peculiarly Gallic, almost querulously high-pitched notes, and approaching the Arc de Triomphe was soon heard the music of the regimental bands playing out the stirring strains of “Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine!”
Now, for the first time since Bismarck’s Prussians had paraded through it, marching men appeared under the sacred arch. But those who led the way in this historic moment were not Foch or Pétain; not the cavalry, or any Allied detachment, but three young men, unspeakably maimed by war, still in uniform, wheeled along in chairs by their nurses. Immediately behind them came a large contingent of more grands mutilés. Officers and simple poilus, all mixed together, many already in mufti, marched—or hobbled—without precedence or semblance of military order, twelve abreast. Many bore on their chests France’s most coveted decoration, the Médaille Militaire. The blind— some accorded the privilege of being ensign-bearers—were led by those who had lost a leg or an arm; men with their destroyed faces mercifully hidden behind bandages; men with no hands; men with their complexions still tinted green from the effects of chlorine gas; men with mad eyes staring out from beneath skullcaps that concealed some appalling head injury. Some were famous heroes, easily recognised by the crowd; among them, identifiable by his immense stature, limped Sergeant André Maginot, already a well-known figure in the National Assembly, who had lost a leg at Verdun.
With a painful, halting pace the column moved down the Champs-Élysées. For a moment the spectacle of the broken men was met with a nervous silence. Then, as they passed a stand filled with 150 young Alsatian girls in national costumes, flowers rained down upon them: “an immense cry, which seemed to spring from the very entrails of the race, arose from the vast crowd, a cry which was both a salute and a pledge.”1 No one who watched the mutilés pass could be unaware of what they represented: the many thousands more, hopelessly mauled, lodged in hospitals across the country which they would never leave; the hundreds of thousands of other war casualties, only relatively more fortunate. Here was the price France had paid, the true price of glory. No combatant nation, except little Serbia, had suffered a higher mortality rate; higher than Russia, higher than Germany or her allies. It was a fact brutally brought home on this luminous day of victory celebrations. A squadron of magnificent Republican Guards then rode through the Arc de Triomphe, accompanied by a thunderous military fanfare, preceding the victorious marshals, Joffre and Foch, and Pétain, then wave upon wave of marching poilus and Allied contingents.
REVELLERS DANCED THAT NIGHT AWAY in the streets of a dazzlingly illuminated city. Yet the morning-after the greatest uncertainty had not been dispelled: what had the peace to offer the people of France? From the great défilé of the quatorze one army had been missing, one without whose aid the “Miracle of the Marne” could never have happened and without whose seemingly bottomless reserves of men there would not have been any victory celebrations at all: Russia, rent by revolution and civil war, and forgotten by her allies. For battered France, however, she sent a spectre to the feast; it was called Communism. For any Parisian who read the small print in the newspapers, it was apparent. On the very day of the signature of the peace treaty a fortnight before, Communists had brought about a Métro and bus strike, paralysing the city. That spring, inflation and the growing restiveness of the workers had led to la vie chère instead of la vie douce becoming the main topic of conversation in many a French household. The government was being tough with these left-wing demonstrators, but its toughness had only embittered the atmosphere.
A political constellation of the far left—Communists, Internationalists and extreme Socialists—had boycotted the victory celebrations. The recent war, in their eyes, had been but a criminal affair between the capitalist classes. The workers in millions had died in it, but pointlessly without a universal revolution, bringing the overthrow of the existing order, as had happened in Lenin’s Russia. Therefore there was no cause at all for rejoicing. Instead, the extremists had decided to stage their own show. Together with some disabled ex-servicemen demonstrating against wartime profiteers, about a hundred people gathered near the Place de la Trinité. As a macabre demonstration against militarism, they had intended to roll several of the mutilés in their invalid carriages in front of Foch’s horse as he rode past the Opéra. They were forestalled by the police, re-formed on the exterior boulevards and marched through the east end of Paris to pay tribute to the Communard martyrs enshrined at Père Lachaise Cemetery. There was a scuffle at the cemetery, and some twenty arrests were made. The next day, Marcel Cachin, editor of L’Humanité, blazed against the Victory Parade:
Bitterness! Disgust! I have recognised the crowd. It is not the crowd that took the Bastille and sang for the first time of liberty in the streets. It is not the crowd that religiously followed the bier of Zola or Jaurès . . . It is the brutish elemental crowd which does not change, which slavishly acclaims Caesar and Boulanger, which yells at the vanquished, which chooses indifferently its heroes among boxers, gladiators and captains. 2
With most lured away by the greater attraction of the Victory Parade that day, the small turnout of Cachin’s supporters was deceptively unrepresentative of the intrinsic, let alone the potential strength of the new left in France. For in none other of the victorious nations had Russia’s October Revolution evoked stronger sympathies than among the workers of Paris—the home of revolution itself. It struck powerful chords with the ancient and deep-rooted revolutionary mystique of 1793 and 1848, but above all with the Commune of 1871, the brutal repression of which remained stamped in the minds of the French left wing and whose failure Lenin had used as a textbook to perfect his own revolution. The foundation in March 1919 of the Third International in Moscow raised radical hearts in France, while it was no accident that among the interventionist forces in Russia it was the French at Odessa who had raised the flag of mutiny. The bourgeois, property-owning classes closed their ranks accordingly.
IN WASHINGTON, where the Senate was beginning its deliberations on the peace treaty, rumours were emerging that President Wilson might yet have difficulty in persuading the American Congress to ratify the instrument that was to guarantee France’s security. With political parties polarised between extremes of right and left, and fickle, self-destructive splinter groupings in between, French politics now embarked on what de Gaulle would one day scathingly designate “this absurd ballet.” In place of the “Banquet Years” or “Miraculous Years,” writers about these times would seek less acclamatory titles such as the “Locust Years,” the “Years of Illusion,” the “Hollow Years” or the “Crazy Years.”
In January 1920, Paul Deschanel had been elected President of the Republic, in succession to Poincaré. Like a symptom of the national malady, the new president was soon worrying his entourage by his increasingly erratic behaviour; on one occasion after a delegation of schoolgirls had presented him with a bouquet, he tossed the flowers back at them one by one. Then, early in the hours of a day in May, he was found in his immaculate pyjamas, wandering along a railway track 70 miles from Paris, on the route to Lyons. Allegedly he had fallen out of a wagon-lit on his way to an engagement in Roanne—miraculously unscathed, bar a few grazes. In the best French way in which the deviations of politicians are kept quiet, the episode was hushed up, though chansonniersswiftly set it to verse Il n’a pas oublié son pyjama C’est épatant, mais c’est comme ça.3
A short while after recovering from his nocturnal foray, Deschanel walked out of a state meeting at Rambouillet—and straight into the lake, fully clothed. That September, after less than a year in office, he was quietly removed to an institution. His sad tenancy at the Élysée said something about the pressures henceforth to be imposed on France’s political leaders, as well as perhaps symbolising the 1920s as les années folles.
IN ECONOMIC TERMS it was indeed a haggard France that faced the dawn of victory in July 1919. Yet, showing the same extraordinary recuperative capacity that had amazed the world in 1871, she repaired her shattered industries, and got her raddled fields back under plough far quicker than any foreign observer could have imagined. It was to the financial structure that lasting damage had been done. To pay for the war, France had issued a flood of paper money. By the armistice, the franc had lost nearly two-thirds of its value. This was only a beginning; whereas it then exchanged at 26 francs to the pound sterling, already by the time of the Victory Parade it had depreciated to 51 francs to the pound. By the middle of 1926 its value had sunk to 220. Fanned by the new virulence of the revolutionary left, the French workers’ justifiable demands for higher wages to offset this inflation gave the spiral an extra spin. Additional millions had to be spent in funding the pensions of the legions of ex-servicemen—notably the mutilés.
The Budget of 1919 had been postponed more than seven months, during which time further vast loans had been launched, so that when finally agreed it showed an enormous deficit of ff27,000 million. Nobody viewed this too tragically; automatically, it was assumed, the Allies would be accommodating, and generous. When America would not help out, France fell back on the happy illusion that “the Boche will pay.” But Germany could not, would not pay; and the Allies would not make her. After all, as they were frequently reminded from Berlin, November 1918 had brought only an armistice, not a capitulation. And had Frenchmen forgotten already how the harsh settlement imposed by Prussia in 1871 had kept alight France’s own fire of revenge for the best part of half a century? The post-war Minister of Finance, Louis-Lucien Klotz (according to Clemenceau “the only Jew who knows nothing about money”), made it clear that he expected France’s budgetary deficits to be redeemed by German reparations, but in 1923 Germany defaulted on her payments. France occupied the Ruhr to force her to pay. Down in Bavaria an angry unknown Austrian ex-corporal acquired his first national publicity. On being forced (unbacked by England) to pull back out of the Ruhr, the illusion of France’s power in the post-war world received its first serious shock.
Although the return of Raymond Poincaré in 1926 brought France an almost miraculous three-year period of quasi-stability (as well as prosperity), in the seventeen months after his retirement in 1929 another five governments came and went. In Paris, by the mid-1920s prices had doubled several times since 1914. While Britain and America were already emerging from the tunnel of the world slump, France was still in economic stasis; between 1928 and 1934, her industrial production dropped by 17 per cent; between 1929 and 1936, average incomes fell by 30 per cent; and by the end of 1935 over 800,000 were unemployed. Thus the nation’s financial dilemma extended into the 1930s, bringing down government after government and rendering impossible any consistent foreign policy or reconciliation with Germany. It bedevilled the Third Republic throughout the remainder of its existence, and finally ham-strung it when the necessity to rearm confronted France with desperate urgency.
BY THE “HOLLOW YEARS” of the 1930s, France had a maturing population of just over 40 million. Between 1900 and 1939 it had grown by little more than a million, and that was largely due to immigration. At the same time Germany, once again, had increased hers—by 36 per cent. Two-thirds of France’s population lived in the towns and cities; just before the turn of the century (1890) the figure had been exactly the reverse, with two-thirds living on the land. The explanation for this dramatic swing lay partly in the devastating losses suffered among the sons of the peasantry in 1914–18, partly also in the universal drift towards city jobs and amenities. Paris remained, as always, the principal magnet.
There was one important faction of society which found life there wonderfully good—and bon marché: the expatriates, and particularly Americans. In 1921, foreign residents of Paris comprised one in twenty of the population; ten years later the figure had almost doubled, while it also accounted for a quarter of all those arrested by the police. Oscar Wilde’s Mrs. Allonby observed that when good Americans die they go to Paris; but after 1919 even not-so-good Americans took off there in droves. The allure was at least partly negative; Paris offered an escape from the restrictive, false Puritan world that Prohibition under the Volstead Act had imposed on young Americans returning from the war; in Paris, by contrast, one was left free to lead one’s private life, to swim—or sink.
Many young Americans had sampled the delights of Paris when serving as Pershing’s doughboys during the war, and wanted to come back for more. Gertrude Stein was already there; among the other notables were John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, Stephen Vincent Benét, Archibald MacLeish, Louis Bromfield, Philip Barry, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker—not to mention F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and, of course, the irresistible Josephine Baker. There was Sylvia Beach, famed founder of Shakespeare and Co., the English bookshop and gathering point near the Odéon—and brave publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses and My Life and Loves by Frank Harris. By 1927, there were known to be 15,000 Americans in Paris—but the real figure was estimated to be much more like 40,000. It was Stein who dubbed her countrymen “the lost generation.” Then came the crash of 1929. Many had to join the queue at the American Embassy for emergency funds to return home. The waves closed over their heads, just as the cold Seine closed over the chiens écrasés, as suicides were coldly dubbed by the Sûreté—the tragic failures of those crossed-in-love, theamputées de coeur.
A KIND OF FALSE CHEER reigned through much of the 1920s and 1930s in France. In the music halls, Maurice Chevalier, the self-proclaimed ace French lover, epitomised the jaunty optimism of the era with his 1921 theme-song: “Dans la vie, faut pas s’en faire” (In life you mustn’t worry). Art was one form of escapism; born of the war, Dadaism was (fortunately) short-lived but demonstrative of the move away from the happy realities of the Impressionists; in the late 1920s it was succeeded by Surrealism, the declared “enemy of reason.” Pointedly it began in a wartime hospital for shell-shocked poilus, where poets André Breton and Louis Aragon, both in their early twenties, had met as medical orderlies. Equally pointed, both founders of the new movement started life in the Communist Party. Surrealism stressed the priority of sexual freedom removed from religious constraints, and liberation of the unconscious. Symbolic, too, was the spectacle of Braque returning from the war with a turban of bandages covering his head wound. It was the horror of trenches which made many like them recoil from the traditional world that had taken them on the road to Verdun, embracing instead an idealist fantasy—just at the time, ironically, when Lenin and Stalin were perpetrating their own worst excesses in southern Russia.
In literature, Dadaism and Surrealism in art were matched by the fantaisiste, fairy-tale world of Cocteau and Giraudoux. Another post-war literary form emphasised the humour of cuckoldry; it was escapism especially designed for the middle-aged male, known asle démon de midi; or, by way of compensation for their female opposite numbers, best-sellers like Raymond Radiguet’s brilliant novel, Le Diable au corps (1923), featuring an early “Mrs. Robinson” figure. But of far more profound significance for French literature in the late 1920s was the spate of anti-war literature that swept Europe, telling of its horror and wastefulness, combined with the cynical callousness and sheer incompetence of the war leaders. In Germany, Hitler had been swift to stifle such books as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, but in France it had become a top best-seller, challenged only by the terrifying novel of Henri Barbusse, Le Feu (first published 1916, winning the Prix Goncourt and selling 300,000 by the war’s end). For France’s Verdun generation, and for their juniors, Le Feu related a nightmare the re-enactment of which must be avoided at all costs. Wielding enormous intellectual influence were various anti-war associations formed by such giants of France’s literary left wing as André Gide, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon and Romain Rolland. Barbusse was the torch-bearer; when he died in 1935, more than 300,000 followed his coffin to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
In 1930s France, the passion for romantic travel, powerful in the twenties, gave way to an equal fascination in the personal “heroic quest” of the agonising man-of-action, adventurers such as Saint-Exupéry and Malraux. But where exactly should one place Céline’s picaresque journey through the First World War (where he was wounded and decorated), Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) with all its relentless, defeatist pessimism, which, nevertheless, made him an instant best-seller?
For all its philosophy of “engagement,” possibly no form of literature demonstrated a greater revolt from reality than the existentialism of young Jean-Paul Sartre and his fellow hot-house inmates of the Café Flore in the latter 1930s. Sartre’s mistress, Simone de Beauvoir, furnishes a revealing chronicle of the attitude of French left-wing intellectuals. The autumn of 1929 had made her feel she was living in a new “Golden Age”: “Peace seemed finally assured; the expansion of the German Nazi party was a mere fringe phenomenon, without any serious significance . . . It would not be long before colonialism folded up.”4 Of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, she writes: “like everyone else on the French left, we watched these developments quite calmly.” She records, almost en passant, Einstein’s flight from Germany; nevertheless, “there was no threat to peace; the only danger was the panic that the right was attempting to spread in France, with the aim of dragging us into war.”
In their film-going, their own brand of escapism led Sartre and Beauvoir to skip Jean Renoir’s classic anti-war film La Grande Illusion, by preference seeking out such American farces as My Man Godfrey, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Despite having given birth to the cinema, France got off to a slow start in the inter-war period. Of 430 films opening in Paris in 1934, less than a quarter were French and few survive. A spectacular exception was Abel Gance’s eight-hour silent epic, Napoléon, of 1926—possibly the most outstanding silent film ever made. Renoir’s La Grande Illusion,rather than being just anti-war and reflecting the political divisions of the Popular Front era, says almost more about the internal class distinctions that divide men—an aristocrat, a banker, a mechanic or a Jew—and the transcendence in comradeship that war can achieve. Its impact was such that, when the French prisoners of war sang the “Marseillaise” in one moving scene, Parisian audiences—regardless of political hue—also rose to their feet to sing. Star of La Grande Illusion was Jean Gabin, the current heart-throb of the French screen, who frequently took the role of the “little man” struggling against a hostile society. Then in 1939—appearing almost on the eve of war—came La Règle du jeu, pitilessly depicting the middle classes as selfish and destructive. When first shown, La Règle provoked riots, and it was banned successively in wartime France by both the Daladier and Vichy regimes.
IN 1933, ADOLF HITLER, product of the bitterness over Versailles and its consequences for Germany, came to power. So often in history when the unpleasantness of reality induces emotional confusion, societies are tempted to bury themselves in imaginary pleasures and distractions. With his instinctive genius, Hitler knew well how to play on all French fears and desires for escapism, accompanying each new foreign adventure with barrages of peace propaganda.
Frenchmen could sleep all the more comfortably at night behind the notional safety of their impenetrable and invincible defences. Collectively, the French General Staff and successive governments concluded from the early disasters of 1914, and the costly defence of Verdun, that the only way to assure survival in a future war was to dig an immense, impenetrable concrete barrier in the east of the country. Hence came the costly, but technically superb Maginot Line—named after the then Minister of Defence, the one-legged hero of Verdun, former sergeant André Maginot. The project had the support of the defensive-minded Marshal Pétain, following the death of Foch, France’s most influential soldier. The concept was fine; except that all great walls offer a standing invitation to go over, under or around them. The Maginot Line was to cost so immense a chunk of France’s declining defence budget that it was impossible to continue it all the way from Sedan to the Channel, and there was not enough money left to provide the mobile forces needed to counter a possible breakthrough. These were ardently called for—but in vain—by a young military thinker called Colonel Charles de Gaulle. In 1930s France, military call-up was beginning to suffer acutely from the effect of the drop in births during the First World War. In Hitler’s Germany, the 1915 class could produce 464,000 effectives; in France, only 184,000—a ratio that would continue right the way through to the Second World War.
UPON THE FUTILE THIRD REPUBLIC POLITICS there burst a miasma of corruption cases. The first big shock came in 1928 with the arrest of Klotz, the former Minister of Finance about whom Clemenceau had been so scathing, on charges of issuing dud cheques. Then there was Serge Stavisky, a seductive young man of Ukrainian-Jewish extraction, who for all his enviable connections had come under official scrutiny. The police found his body in a house in Chamonix— conveniently perhaps for Prime Minister Camille Chautemps, whose own brother-in-law was the prosecutor who had mysteriously failed to bring him to justice. Overnight Stavisky became the best-known name since Dreyfus—costing further public trust in the government and arousing renewed anti-Semitism.
On 27 January 1934, the Chautemps government fell—after an inning of just two months and four days. From mid-1932 up to the outbreak of war in 1939, France’s score of governments would total nineteen, including eleven different premiers. Thus, France lacked any continuity in the direction of her affairs, her leaders regarded with increasing contempt. A favourite insult hurled from Parisian taxis became “Espèce de député.” On 6 February, 1934, a group of right-wing nationalist factions, sickened by France’s retreat from grandeur since 1919, as by the corrupt ineptitude of her politicians, and fearful of the rising strength of the new “Bolshevik” left, united to march on the Assembly.
Just when, across the Rhine, Adolf Hitler was consolidating himself in power, this day marked the beginning of what approximated to civil war in France. On the right wing were “leagues” such as the Camelots du Roi, shock troops of the monarchist, Catholic, anti-Semitic Action Française journal of Charles Maurras,5 which had influenced the furore around Stavisky. There were the violently anti-Communist Jeunesses Patriotes, and Solidarité Française created by funds from the perfumery fortune of François Coty, its members wearing a paramilitary uniform of black beret and blue shirt and with a motto of “La France aux Français!” The most articulate of the leagues was the Croix de Feu led by Colonel Casimir de la Rocque, and dedicated to the purgation of the Third Republic. “Honesty” and “Order” were its twin battle cries, and, though it was not fascist like some other leagues, it shared their admiration for the vigour that Mussolini had instilled into Italian youth. As the scandals multiplied, so the Croix de Feu adopted a more blatantly anti-republican attitude. The patrician colonel himself was certainly no rabble-rouser like Hitler. His voice was too high, his diction too elaborate, for mass appeal; just too genteel. Nevertheless, to the left, Colonel de la Rocque epitomised everything that it loathed and feared in fascism.
On the morning of the 6th, Action Française printed with the most provocative headlines: “the thieves are barricading themselves in their cave. Against this abject regime, everyone in front of the Chamber of Deputies this evening.” At about 6 p.m., the first push—with a number of grands mutilés veterans placed conspicuously to the fore—attempted to force through police barriers drawn up on the Pont de la Concorde. They hurled bottles, stones and sections of lead piping at the police, and when the mounted police charged, the hocks of their horses were slashed with razors tied to sticks. Inside the Chamber, the new government, headed by Édouard Daladier, was still struggling to get a vote of confidence. By 7:30, warnings by the police had not dispersed the crowd, and they opened fire. It was not until midnight that the deputies could conclude they were safe. Had Daladier not taken precautions to have the Chamber guarded, there might well have been a repetition of the scenes of February 1848 on the Paris streets.
Out of some 40,000 demonstrators, sixteen had been killed and at least 655 were known to be wounded; well over a thousand policemen received injuries. The next day Colonel de la Rocque proclaimed from his secret battle headquarters: “The Croix de Feu has surrounded the Chamber and forced the deputies to flee.” It was a gross exaggeration; but the Communists now also took up cudgels against the government. One eye-witness actually saw a Camelot du Roi and a Communist jointly pulling down a lamp-post—just about the last occasion in time of peace that the two extremes of French political life would be able to find common cause. In the heated atmosphere, Daladier resigned. It was the first time since 1871 that a Paris mob had brought about the fall of a French government. Ex-President Gaston Doumergue, aged seventy, formed a “National Government,” but in a patriotic gesture to the right wing made his contemporary, Marshal Pétain, the “Hero of Verdun,” Minister of National Defence.
The entire left thought in terror that it saw the imminence of a right-wing coup d’état, with Colonel de la Rocque primed for the role of Louis-Napoleon—or Benito Mussolini. On the morning of 9 February, the communist L’Humanité called a mass meeting in the Place de la République, to demand the dissolution of both the Chamber and its ephemeral right-wing allies. That night near the République, two rival columns approached each other, one of Communists, the other of Jeunesses Socialistes, representing the two principal left-wing parties. The two had hardly been on speaking terms since their schism of 1920–21. At first it looked as if there would be conflict. However, amid cries of “We’re not clashing, we’re fraternising . . . we’re all here to defend the Republic,” the heads of the two columns mingled and clasped hands, then marched together. The whole left swung behind a general strike. “United as at the front!” had been on the lips of Colonel de la Rocque’s anciens combattants on 6 February, “Unity of action!” the slogan of the heirs to the Commune three days later.
These developments did nothing for national unity. That July, Blum the Socialist leader and Thorez the Communist signed a pact; by October L’Humanité was beginning to talk about a “Front Populaire contre le Fascisme.” Meanwhile, France’s economic plight was lending further cohesive force to left-wing solidarity. The plight of many French workers and their families was genuinely appalling.66
ON 14 JULY 1935, de la Rocque’s Croix de Feu marched with smart military precision down the Champs-Élysées. But the day belonged to the left, demonstrating at the other end of Paris. Down from Belleville and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine they flooded to the Place de la Bastille; probably over half a million strong. Beneath great red banners proclaiming “Paix, Pain, Liberté!,” the Front Populaire was officially launched. That afternoon Daladier, the Radical-Socialist former prime minister whose downfall the Communists had helped bring about the previous year, marched with them; arm in arm, like blood brothers, went Blum and Thorez, Herriot and Barbusse and Duclos. At their congress that October, the French Radicals too decided to throw in their lot. On 3 May 1936, France went to the polls and the Front Populaire was swept into power. Formerly with only 10 seats, the Communists now emerged with no fewer than 72; the Socialists, gaining another 49 seats, became the strongest party and accordingly it fell to Léon Blum to form a government. The left had scored its greatest triumph since 1871; but how, with the clouds growing more and more sombre beyond the Rhine, was it going to exploit this victory?
Buoyed up with the exhilaration of victory, and now united, French workers declared they would strike unless Blum gave them what they demanded, at once. Three weeks after his election, the Lavalette factory in north-west Paris and the Nieuport aircraft works at Issy in the south-west—building aircraft urgently needed by the French Air Force—were paralysed by sit-in strikes. Friends outside provided them with food, cigarettes and bedding, and they settled down for the night, arguing and playing cards or boules. Alcohol was banned, but the general tone was of insouciant levity. Day by day the bizarre situation renewed itself, the factory owners being told that if they attempted to break the strike, their plants would be burnt down. Gradually the unions assumed formal control. Eventually affecting 12,000 enterprises, strikes smoothly took over the Farman aircraft works and the factories of Citroën, Renault, Gnome et Rhône, and Simca—all vital to the French armaments industry. Sunday promenaders headed out to the factories to gaze at the workers laughing and entertaining themselves among the dead machinery.
Blum began hastily to prepare reforming legislation as prices on the Bourse plunged, and money was taken abroad. Blum was now the focus of opprobrium, including anti-Semitic emotions reawoken by Stavisky—sloganised as “rather Hitler than Blum”—only exacerbated by the influx of thousands of Austro-German Jewish refugees. Then at 1 a.m. on 8 June 1936, Blum signed the famous “Matignon Agreement.” Under what was undoubtedly their greatest ever single advance in French industrial relations, the workers were guaranteed compulsory collective bargaining and annual paid holidays, a forty-hour week, and an immediate general rise in wages of 7 to 15 per cent. Yet still the strikes continued, until on the 11th Thorez was forced to intervene by telling his Communist supporters: “You must know when to end a strike!” That 14 July—at what was both the high point and the swansong of the Front— the entire left celebrated, linking arms once again around the Bastille— after almost a century-and-a-half, at last delivered to the proletariat.
INTO THE WARM CAMARADERIE of France’s socialist triumph and her perennial game of legislative musical chairs, there burst the malignant, irreconcilable figure of Hitler. In March 1936, he marched into the demilitarised Rhineland, in gross breach of Versailles. His as yet still feebleWehrmacht had orders to withdraw immediately in the event of any French reaction. But reaction came there none. France looked towards Britain. London, however, was preoccupied with Italy and Abyssinia; besides had not their wartime ally declared, just two years previously, that “France will henceforth guarantee her security by her own means?”67—thereby killing the Disarmament Conference. In any case, a large portion of Britons now agreed with Lord Lothian’s historic comment about the Germans “only going into their own back garden.” In the opinion of Paul Reynaud, had France acted alone, Britain would have been bound to back her up. Rebuffed, Hitler might well have been uprooted by a German opposition that still had teeth. Increasingly, with hindsight, historians now see the Rhineland—not Munich two years later—to have been the point where the Battle in the West was won by Hitler, lost by France. But, for all her crushing military superiority then, France did nothing. It was Blum who declared “not a penny, not a man for Berlin.”
INSTEAD, THE “MATIGNON AGREEMENT,” so Simone de Beauvoir recorded, “filled us with joy”—a thoroughly escapist pleasure. Thanks to fifteen days of paid holidays and the forty-hour week, “couples on tandem bicycles could now be seen pedalling out of Paris every Saturday morning; they came back on Sunday evening with bunches of flowers and foliage tied to their handlebars.” “Leisure! Leisure!” one newspaper rejoiced. Arcadian photographs appeared of workers thronging the beaches, picnicking and camping in the hitherto unfrequented countryside. A mass following grew for sports, notably football and cycling; between 1936 and 1938, the number of bicycles rose from 7 to 9 million. As the sporting pages of Paris-Soir made it overnight the journalistic success story of the decade, the Tour de France acquired a new popularity. For the long under-paid and under-privileged, it looked like Paradise gained. But could France afford it, with Hitler about to move on Austria and Czechoslovakia, and rearming at terrifying speed? Movingly, Léon Blum remarked: “I had the feeling, in spite of everything, of having brought a lull, a vista, into their dark difficult lives . . . we had given them hope.”
Yet the truth was that it had rendered the future of France as a whole more hopeless, as the French military and industry continued to stagnate. By 1938, French industrial production had sunk an estimated 25 per cent below the 1930 figure; in Germany it had risen 30 per cent. Incredibly, the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre (CSG) met but thirteen times during the four critical years of 1935–39, and was apparently never once consulted about tactical operations of major units. These were the years when damage was done to the French Army which it became too late to remedy (and, incidentally, despite the blame heaped on him subsequently, they were the years when Pétain’s influence had been totally removed). When the Berlin-based American correspondent, William L. Shirer, visited Paris in October 1938, he found it a frightful place, completely surrendered to defeatism with no inkling of what has happened to France . . . Even the waiters, taxi-drivers, who used to be sound, are gushing about how wonderful it is that war has been avoided, that it would have been a crime, that they fought in one war and that was enough.
That would, he thought, “be okay if the Germans, who also fought in one war, felt the same way, but they don’t.”6
BY 1939 FOREIGN CRISES were effecting all sorts of contradictions in Paris. After Hitler had completed his devouring of Czechoslovakia, in March Britain gave Poland a guarantee of her national integrity. After Mussolini had grabbed Albania, France joined Chamberlain in extending similar guarantees to Romania and Greece; but the Quai d’Orsay under the defeatist and dislikeable Georges Bonnet threatened to take the Nouvelle Revue Française to court the moment it attacked either Hitler or Mussolini. In May the pro-German pacifist Marcel Déat (who would come into his own the following year) published a powerful article entitled “Do We Have to Die for Danzig?”—and with it mourir pour Danzig entered the Parisian vernacular. The 150th anniversary of the Great Revolution came and went with minimum fuss; certainly gazes were discreetly averted from the menaced Liberté and Égalité of the Bohemians or Poles. There was much more interest in the thirty-second Tour de France—though boycotted by German and Italian riders.
Then came the last 14 July celebration, an echo full of the splendid panoply of a past age; Foreign Legionnaires, Senegalese, cuirassiers in shining breastplates—and a detachment of British grenadiers in red tunics and bearskins to reassure Frenchmen as to the reality of the entente—all under a drenching rain. Proclaimed by Premier Daladier to be a “fête of national unity,” in fact it was a day of rival marches and counter-marches. Instantly 3 million Frenchmen took off to the mountains and beaches on paid holidays; with them many took the new bestseller from America—Autant en emporte le vent (Gone With the Wind)—for their holiday reading. President Lebrun retired to his home in Lorraine; Premier Daladier reclined on the yacht of a friend in the Mediterranean; Finance Minister Paul Reynaud sailed off to Corsica. Even the Communist leaders departed insouciantly—Thorez to the Mediterranean, and Duclos to the Pyrenees, as L’Humanité continued to call for a pact with Moscow. One politician with his eye on the ball did visit the Maginot Line—but it was not a Frenchman, it was Winston Churchill. How radically concerns had changed since that jour de gloire of just twenty years previously! Where were the alliances Delcassé had worked so hard to build? In the East, Soviet Russia was an enigma; America had returned to isolation; and the force Britain could offer in case of war was relatively even weaker than the “Old Contemptibles” she had sent in 1914. And France was riven with political faction, demoralised and trying to forget the losses of 1914–18.
ON 2 3 AUGUST news of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact brought the sojourn to a chilling end. Reservists only recently released following the Munich mobilisation were recalled, but as Paul Reynaud remarked, “The Allies had lost the game.” On 1 September, as Je Suis Partout ran a headline “À BAS LA GUERRE, VIVE LA FRANCE!” Hitler invaded Poland; two days later France and Britain declared war on Germany. This time, in a reversal of 1914 France reacted six hours behind her allies. Sartre began a letter to Simone de Beauvoir, “Folly has triumphed”; more appositely Anatole de Monzie wrote in his diary: “France at war does not believe in the war.” That said it all. The odds facing her were colossal. Looking back from the vantage point of 1940, Joseph Goebbels observed:
In 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I had been the French premier I would have said it): “The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!” But they didn’t do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war! 7
Though containing some distortion of the historic facts, the basic truth here is hardly to be denied. The new German blitzkrieg smashed the valiant Poles in three weeks—without any intervention from General Gamelin’s French Army. There was the expected chaos as mobilisation took place; but the Bourse held fast; cheerfully optimistic slogans of “We will be Victorious because We are the Strongest” appeared everywhere. And there was, of course, the invincible Maginot Line to keep the Boches at bay this time. Gamelin set up his GQG at Vincennes, on the eastern outskirts of Paris, in order to be as closely in touch with his political masters as possible. This was the reverse of what Joffre had done, and it meant, equally, that Gamelin was even more out of touch with the front than Joffre had been. All other comparisons are invidious; Gamelin lacked his power, his calm strength of will, his ability—and his forces. On paper, these forces were not all that disparate to the Germans; France in fact had more tanks, and some were better, but they were deployed in an antique fashion throughout the army, instead of concentrated into powerful Panzer divisions, such as Colonel de Gaulle had called for. And of course both she and her British ally were fatally weak in the air. Much of that could be attributed to the idle workshops in the heady days of the Front Populaire.
FRANCE’S INVOLVEMENT in the Second World War falls into roughly four phases: Phase I, the “Phoney War” from the declaration of 1939 to the capitulation of June 1940; Phase II, the Occupation up to the Allied landings in North Africa of November 1942; Phase III, from “Torch” to “Overlord,” 6 June 1944; and, finally, Phase IV, Liberation, 1944 to May 1945. As if by some bizarre natural law governing the climate in years that preface a cataclysm, such as 1914 and 1870, seldom was there a more sparkling spring than that of 1940. Parisians lingered in the trottoir cafés, listening to the strains of “J’attendrai” and thinking wistfully of last year’s paid vacations. A visiting American journalist, Clare Boothe, went into raptures at how chestnuts burst into leaf on the lovely avenues of Paris, sunlight danced off the opalescent grey buildings, and the gold and grey sunsets, glimpsed through the soaring Arc de Triomphe at the end of the long splendid vista of the Champs-Élysées, brought a catch of pain and pleasure in your throat. Paris was Paris in April!8
There were art shows in the Grand Palais, racing had resumed at Auteuil (it had been suspended on the outbreak of war), and soccer matches took place between Tommies and poilus in the suburbs. “The shop windows of van Cleef and Arpels and Mauboussin and Cartier sparkled with great jewels in the sunlight,” Clare Boothe recalled. “And lots of people bought them.” The Ritz, as usual, was “crowded with lovely ladies wearing simple dresses or the smart uniforms of the Union des Femmes de France service.”
With Hitler apparently hesitant to attack the mighty Maginot Line, much of the fears of the previous winter had dissipated, to be replaced by the dread malady of l’ennui—particularly insidious within the dank casemates of the Line. The poilus of 1940 (according to Jean-Paul Sartre, who was one) took to looting vacated Alsatian farmhouses instead. Morale at the front during the drôle de guerre (Phoney War) was low— though quite unaffected among those in Paris. The Academy was to be found peaceably working away on its eternal dictionary:
The definition of the word aile led to a passage of arms between Abel Bonnard and Georges Duhamel. The previous edition had called a wing “a muscle.” “It’s perfectly ridiculous,” said Bonnard. “A wing is a limb.
“On the contrary,” said Dr. Duhamel, “a wing is a muscle. What you eat in the wing of a chicken is the muscle, no more and no less.”
And so the argument continued. Could anything, one might have wondered, could anything alter the basic facts of French life? Underneath this veneer of “business as usual,” reality however was all too evident to a discerning future prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France. Returning on leave from Syria at the beginning of May, he was shocked at what he found:
Everyone, civilian and military, thought only of organising his personal life as well as possible in order to get through this seemingly indefinite period without too much risk, loss or discomfort . . . One heard only of recreation for the army, sport for the army, art and music for the army, theatrical shows for the army and so on.9
Meanwhile the limp Daladier, ill-named the “Bull of Vaucluse,” had been replaced by Paul Reynaud—a diminutive figure whose courage belied his stature—and in England Chamberlain was about to be replaced by Churchill. But both were to prove too late to save France. The real war had begun.